Getting credit for an online conversion - and giving due credit to all recent influences - has been one of the hottest topics in digital marketing over the past couple of years. The urgency of the matter has grown as media costs -- especially click prices on paid search keywords -- have risen.

Marketers have been so hungry for better attribution of "keyword assists" (or simply, the non-overriding of the first click in the sequence towards purchase, whether that's over a matter of hours or many months), they've been willing to explore cumbersome customizations in a variety of analytics platforms, including Google Analytics.

But if you're looking to simply analyze the contribution of paid keyword searches on Google Search that preceded the keywords that led directly to a sales conversion (aka "assists"), you'd prefer to see all that data rolled up conveniently within Google AdWords itself, showing the data in handy formats that might make it easy to change your bidding patterns. In particular, earlier stage keywords (typically, before a last-click brand search) would now be revalued in your model; you'd bid them higher in cases where they made assists.

Earlier, when I defended the "last click"'s merits as an attribution method, I pointed to some data by Marin Software showing 74% of etail conversions only have one associated click - even counting assists. Moreover, Marin's approach bucketed prior clicks categorically, arguing that if a prior click was very similar in intent or style to the last click, then the extra information wouldn't be enough to cause you to alter bidding patterns anyway. That knocked the number of truly "assist-powered" conversions (that you could actually attribute properly) down to 10% or less.

This is where Google's new reporting needs to be scrutinized closely. In your individual case it could be quite valuable, but in current individual case studies Google may have on hand, anywhere from 70-95% of conversions only have one click to speak of. If Marin's logic above is even close to sensible, then it does underscore the limits to assist data. There will be some value attributable to assist keywords in around 10% of conversions, give or take. That's actionable but not earth-shattering. Of course, this is going to be most valuable to advertisers who have a lot of prior influencer clicks hiding behind a high number of clicks that are currently attributed to a last-click on the brand name.

To pump up the role of prior keywords, it might be fair to also point to assist impressions - views of the ad on Google Search where the ad wasn't clicked, but shown. But in those cases was the ad really seen? Perhaps not, but there may be some value in knowing what search keywords got the searcher's research motor running. Perhaps they clicked on a competitor's ad. Google is offering impression assist data as well with this release, which will be sure to delight trivia buffs, AdWords junkies, and Google's accountants alike.

Remember, we're not just talking about multiple searches all done in a single day, or in one session. Google is logging the time and date of every search by that user prior to a purchase/lead, and when a conversion happens, full funnel information is available as to the time lag between clicks and before the conversion.

Adding in impression assists to the mix, we may see past search query information for up to 20-25% of conversions in some advertiser accounts. Again, while not stupendous, this at least counts as extremely important and material to how you approach keyword value.

The ease of sorting in order of frequency of conversion by assist keyword helps not only to see the keywords in question, but with the "keyword transition path" view, you can see what last click converters they preceded, to better understand the consumer mindset. The screen shot below is a canned Google example while the program is still in beta. In my briefing I saw a more typical and valuable case example that showed the frequency (fictitious example to replace the one I saw) paths like "almond milk calories" > planethealthnut or "milk alternative" > planethealthnut. Whereas the brand might have got disproportionate credit for this conversion in the past, now, keywords like [milk alternative] or [almond milk calories] might attract higher bids, even more so if you experiment over time, allowing for more repetitions of your "research stage keywords" over many months.

In my opinion, "paths" work fairly well as a metaphor here and are not too misleading because the "funnel" steps tend to be relatively coherent and causal in practice. They aren't necessarily so, however. The reason these reports can look sensible is because they're drawn from a narrow universe of high-intent keywords that advertisers are avidly bidding on. You're not going to see a paid search keyword funnel path like "drawbridge in mexico" > james mcbleckr phone 415 > nike > air jordans used > nike.com largely because Nike doesn't have most of the keywords in that path in their paid search account. Truly generating causal paths out of all the things someone does online prior to a conversion is likely to be incredibly messy, but that's a much longer story.

Long story short: life is indeed a lot simpler when viewed through the prism of an AdWords account. And today, advertisers are getting what they desperately seek: easy-to-use information about paid keyword search attribution so that the last click doesn't override all other attribution data.